Stuart “the
Happy Handicapper” Tucker gives every team member a Baton
Rating. Baton Ratings are summed to get a team's Power Rating.
Here's his explanation of how he comes up with it all:

What is
this "Baton Rating" stuff all about? My old
system used seven variables, many of which overlapped—and it was
totally dependent upon the breadth of the field. That made the odds fluctuate
with each new entry. Few, if any, teammates could ever remember their
odds going into the convention. What fun was that? So, I thought,
why not give the team a power rating that didn't fluctuate--one that
represented its raw potential, regardless of competition? Face it, "the
competition" is
pretty much the entire world's best players who show up--regardless of
whether or not these players are teamed with anybody. It doesn't take
a Team Competition Entry to knock Reiff off his Football Strategy pedestal
(though if you know of anybody who can, I know many a team which would
like to have that person carry a baton for them).

With this in mind,
I came up with a system of rating each player's value based on the assumption
that each player will enter the team event in which they have the best
world standing. I narrowed down the parameters slightly--cutting out
some of the duplication of significance. And I got rid of perhaps the
least significant variable from the earlier system. The end result is
that a Baton Rating is composed of a player's success in his best event
plus his overall success at WBC plus what I call "team savvy."

Success
in an event is judged, most appropriately by Wood earned and recent
world standing (which is either recent Laurels earned or AREA Rating).
You get Baton Rating points for Wood (gauged according to the recent size
of that event--in terms of Team Tournament points earnable). You get Baton
Rating points for being ranked in the top 15 in the event. Overall success
at WBC is judged by the number of opponents defeated in earning all of
your Wood.

Finally, "team savvy" is represented by the number
of
times your team has scored in the top 25 over the lifetime of WBC and
Avaloncon team competitions. Yes, this means an otherwise ratingless teammate
contributes to a team's score by being smart enough to be on winning teams
of the past. Call it a lucky charm factor. Or team spirit. Whatever. It
just seems to me that experience at joining teams that consistently score
well shows some sort of "edge" over other unranked players in
the field. Or put the other way around, if you are the weak link on your
team, your teammates must have a good reason for carrying you as dead weight.
That's worth something. Who am I to judge those teammates as illogical?
They play with the player and know his potential.

Hence, each player now has a Baton
Rating in my database and the team is the sum of those ratings. Let's
look at a recent example of the Manly Men team. In 2004, Bruce Reiff
had a Baton Rating of 107, the best in the world--not just because
he has won so much Wood at WBC, but because he utterly dominates FBS, his
best team event. Ken Gutermuth is a 69, which was quite respectable, but
showed that Ken's ability to deliver Wood is somewhat more suspect.
He has scored Wood in more events than Reiff, but to date has no three-peat.
Dave Metzger added a 62, with his strength being that he tends to dominate
smaller events, a bit more consistently than Gutermuth. Steve Likevich
contributed an underrated 36. His Wood to date vastly underestimates
his Wood potential in the classic wargame tournaments. In all, these four
had a team power rating of 274. This system places a heavier
emphasis on recent performance in players' top-rated
events.

This is not to say that all Wood is the same.
If a player drops out of the top rankings of the event, older Wood will
not make up for the fact that an opposing recent WBC champion is a current
top-rated player. And a wide number of players have Wood from events that
no longer exist, with no Wood for the current tournaments. This has been
appropriately downgraded in the scoring system, without losing the fact
that such players have already shown a certain winning potential.

Fine Print:
1) As usual, nobody should take any of this seriously enough to actually try
to find a bookie for their bet.
2) Please refrain from using batons on the body of your happy handicapper,
virtual or otherwise.
3) Lying to A.R.E.A. will only lengthen your nose, not your Baton Rating.